The vast growth of content available over the Internet has led to a significant increase in the amount of time people spend interacting with computers. This can be especially common in children, who are more inclined to stay indoors to play electronic games than to go outside and participate and physical activities.
Research has shown that, during the 1970s and 1980s, children participated on average in over two hours of play outside each weekday and a further nine hours of play outside on weekends. Currently, the time children spend outside playing is estimated at no more than an hour each weekday, and less than 5 hours on weekends. The decrease in time spent performing physical activities for people generally and children in particular is concerning because physical activity is not only important for remaining active and healthy, but also for socializing.
Augmented reality (AR) technology typically presents real world information (e.g., an image of a real world environment) augmented by virtual information (e.g., images, text, sounds, etc.). Such real world information may include data from various sensors such as, but not limited to, accelerometers, GPS devices, compasses, gyroscopes, proximity sensors, cameras, and microphones.
Virtual objects are objects within a software application that can be displayed on a display of a computing device. In the context of digital gaming, virtual objects may be utilized to populate the virtual world created by an application. These virtual objects may include, but are not limited to, video game characters, trees, mountains, animals, fireworks, arrows, monsters, sports balls, and other environmental effects.
A common application of AR technology is for displaying real world imagery including live video or still images, and overlaying (i.e., superimposing) virtual objects on the real world imagery. To produce such AR imagery, a camera captures a video or still image of the real world, and a computing device superimposes one or more virtual objects over the captured video or still image.
AR images can be more entertaining when the virtual objects shown in the AR imagery convincingly appear to exist in the real world. However, in many cases, the depiction of interactions between virtual and real world objects in AR imagery is less than realistic. As a result, user engagement with the games or any other content may be decreased by the less than realistic depiction, thereby causing lower levels of user engagement.
AR games can be utilized to encourage physical activity. For example, augmented reality games may cause displays of characters based on location and movements of a user device. This location and movement-based character display may cause users to actively and physically move to different locations in order to interact with the characters.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a solution that would overcome the deficiencies of the prior art.